


Chris-cross

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Past Fic, Still werewolf/hunter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 22:46:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1178862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>God bless anyone who has written more than 20,000 words of anything.</p></blockquote>





	1. The Missing Students

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skywardsmiles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skywardsmiles/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God bless anyone who has written more than 20,000 words of anything.

His first murder coincided with the third kidnapping and the second murder with the fourth kidnapping and the third with the sixth. They had a terrible way of aligning like that. If Peter had known any better, he would have been more careful of when he chose to sack his bodies away.

But it was so very difficult to keep much of anything from concurring with those damn abductions since they seemed to be happening all the time. By December of 1988, the kidnapper had taken ten students and Peter had killed a grand total of five family members on his mother’s side alone.

The only difference between them was Peter got caught before the kidnapper did.

 

* * *

 

It’s a square room, almost perfectly, and he can’t decide if that’s a foresight or coincidence; he assumes people lacking structure would find some solace in a room, so perfectly symmetrical, like a sandwich with the crusts cut off. There’s a desk, dark wood, toward one wall, upon which usual office supplies are arranged, near the edges: a tissue box, a silver penholder, a computer. He respects these, because they’re not eccentric like the kinds on his teachers’ desks. Tape dispensers shaped like high heel shoes; mouse pads with oriental designs, like little magic carpets. This desk is bare, elegant, like a clean shave. The only item with any personality is the small skull, sitting on one corner, bleached. It looks like a fox skull. 

A leather chair sits behind the desk. Empty--yet to be filled. On the wall behind the chair, there are three posters of landscapes with motivational phrases superimposed on them: “dream,” “achieve,” “inspire.” Peter wonders if it’s mandatory that every school counselor has these on his wall. Perhaps they are consoling elements for the students or for the counselor himself--considering his job.

The door opens and he’s four minutes late, which is one less than the amount of time it would take for Peter to start snooping through the drawers. He doesn’t know what he might have found: student files, a stress ball, a few spare coins. Whatever it might have been, it didn’t matter—it would have gone into his backpack. Compensation for making him wait. 

“You’re early,” the counselor says.

Without looking over, Peter says, “You’re late.” There’s bite in the response, as if this is his office and the counselor a student he’s summoned. Role reversal. He wonders if he can write him a demerit for it.

The counselor doesn’t move from the doorway. He’s standing just outside of Peter’s field of view, a fingertip on a camera lens. Peter has to look over to see what he’s doing.

He’s average height, maybe a little shorter than Peter. His skin is dark, unplaceable. He’s wearing a heather gray suit. And he’s standing stock still.

“Good.” He smiles. The smile is distant, practiced. A spasm of congeniality. “So you know what late means.”  He continues to his desk after this remark, as if he couldn’t proceed without it, like a vampire needing to be invited into a home. Did Peter give something away?

“The topic of our talk today will be lateness,” he says, settling into the cavernous leather chair behind the desk. “Or, more precisely, attendance. My name is Mr. Deaton.” Pen in hand, he gestures to the placard engraved with his name, front and center on his desk. It offers no clues to his origin, Peter notices.

He’s leafing through a file folder, one he’s pulled from a desk drawer, probably looking for a name. Beacon High is big; the faculty has no time to familiarize itself with each student. Peter decides, generously, to help him out. “My name is—“

“Peter Hale,” he says. “I know.” Mr. Deaton lifts a stack of paper that’s stapled together like a test booklet from the folder. It’s apparently what he was looking for since his smile is back. But just as quickly, it’s gone.

“As I said, we are here to discuss your attendance.”

“You mean my sentence,” Peter says, unabashed. Why should he hide his distaste for school? He knows the faculty is just as melancholy as the students. Sometimes it’s appreciated when a student says things like that. Some think it’s funny. After all, the students get away with it more easily than the staff.

Mr. Deaton stares at him through his glasses. “To each his own,” he says, “but I’m afraid it’s a sentence you haven’t been serving, Peter.” He sets the stack of paper down on the open folder.

He sets the stack of paper down, in the open folder, and Peter sees the top page is a transcript of his class schedule. Beside each class period is a bold print U. He knows this symbol: it stands for “unexcused.” The stack is a list of his absences.

“Oh,” Peter says. Now that he knows what this is about, he knows how to behave. With mock grief, he continues, “I’m afraid there’s been a death in my family.”

It’s a brilliant performance; his lip even trembles. He lifts a hand to his chest--over his heart like a silent film starlet--to make his grief seem more authentic, then corrects, “Deaths. There have been a few.”

Family deaths are supposed to be covered under Beacon High’s attendance policy. For each one, there are three excused absences. It’s like a doctor’s note, without ever having to see a doctor. A Get Out of Jail Free card.

“A whole extinction, it seems.” With his thumb, Mr. Deaton peels through the corner of the stack like a flip book. “There is a saying, Peter. ‘One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.’”

He knows he’s caught now. Peter drops his arm from his chest and Mr. Deaton smiles. Like the stack of absences, he’s found something else he was looking for. A fault.

Peter senses the shift of power in the room. The roles are no longer reversed. Mr. Deaton seems to notice this too and Peter crosses his arms over his chest. He’s not giving anything else away.

“Honestly, I would have assumed that this school had better things to do than police a few absences,” he says. It’s a cheap shot, considering it’s aimed at the missing students, but it’s the only thing he can think of. He doesn’t have any dirt on Mr. Deaton. He doesn’t even know where he comes from.

“We do,” says Mr. Deaton, then he rises from his desk.

Peter follows him with his eyes as Deaton circles around to stand in front of the window to his left. He wonders, Is that it? Is administration really so burdened with buffing up security at the moment that they can’t bother with discipline? Was this whole talk a farce? It’s almost comical, but Peter holds his laughter.

“So,” he says, deciding to press the subject, “you’re saying there’s no punishment for this? Really?” He knows he shouldn’t even tease the idea, but he skipped fifteen days of school. He couldn’t imagine a few Saturday detentions would absolve him of that.

“Normally we would expel you,” Mr. Deaton echoes, looking out his window. The window faces the school courtyard, which, being halfway through second period, is empty. “But I’m afraid we don’t reward truancy.”

So there it is. Assuming that expulsion for someone who would have skipped the days anyway would be about as effective as drowning a fish, they’ve come up short handed. It doesn’t mean he’s off the hook, though. It just means he’s safe from one of the penalties. There has to be a catch. A lesser evil.

As if on cue, Mr. Deaton continues, “We do, however, reward volunteerism.”

He leaves the window to return to his desk and Peter thinks, volunteerism? Does he mean community service? Like picking up trash? He’d rather be expelled if that’s the case.

But he doesn’t say that.

He says, with mock interest, “Volunteerism?”

“Yes, volunteerism.” He settles into his leather chair again and produces another file folder from the drawer. It’s not thick, Peter sees. Not loaded with absences. In fact, there’s hardly anything in it at all.

“We have a new student to our school,” Mr. Deaton continues. He opens the folder and reveals a printed student file. There’s a monochrome picture of a boy with shaggy hair and a cleft chin, like a cartoon strongman in the top right corner. “His name is Christopher Argent and you will be responsible for showing him around the campus.”

Babysitter, Peter thinks. It’s no surprise. In the past four months ten students have gone missing on school grounds. They don’t want that happening to new ones--who could get lost much easier--so they’ve taken to pairing them with ushers. The buddy system.

Peter considers it. It’s softer punishment than expulsion, of course, but none of it’s on his terms. There’s also one matter Mr. Deaton left out.

“Correct me if I misheard,” Peter says, “but you mentioned something about rewarding volunteerism. What’s my reward?”

“Your reward?” Mr. Deaton smiles and says, “Of course. For showing Chris around the campus, you will be excused from the three weeks of summer school the principal had planned for you. To compensate for the days you missed. That is your reward.”

 

* * *

 

   He’s released from Mr. Deaton’s office into the reception room to collect Christopher Argent and having been given a copy of his student file as a reference.

There’s nothing confidential on the Xerox: he checked. It’s only the top page of his file that’s been printed with corporeal facts, such as his gender and ethnicity. The picture in the top right corner of the copy is too dark to make out, botched from the original by too much ink. A copy of a copy.

The long, varnished bench just outside the office door is vacant of students, as is the rest of the reception room. Two receptionists sit behind computers at their wide, joint desk as they type one thing or another. There’s a scent of sugar in the air--probably doughnuts--as if a box is hidden under the desk that they don’t want anyone catching them with; then they would have to share. Past that, against the opposite wall, there is a fish tank humming like a giant, blue microwave.

He doesn’t see a Christopher Argent anywhere in between.

Maybe he’s in the bathroom or he could have taken to exploring the school on his own. Maybe he’s already gotten lost. Peter considers writing “Argent” in thick black marker on the back of the Xerox and posting himself by the desk like an airport chauffeur.

But before he can snatch a Sharpie from the cup on the reception desk, he notices the silhouette of a person standing outside the room’s flyer covered windows. Between the lowest flyers and the bottom of the frame, there is a gap of clear glass. He can see the hem of a shirt and a hand:  white, definitely male. It matches the description on the Xerox.

Peter exits the reception room to determine the hand’s owner and the mechanical closer on the door makes for an unintentionally stealthy approach. The guy doesn’t hear it close. He doesn’t seem to know he’s there. It’s like bird watching.

He’s standing in front of the window, scanning over the flyers. Peter knows that they’re advertisements for everything from scholarship opportunities to school clubs. There’s a banner over the window made of yellow butcher paper that announces the upcoming basketball game in smeared purple paint. Over that, someone’s posted a flyer for the upcoming musical in glossy pink and blue so that the date of the game cannot be read.

But Peter sees that the guy isn’t looking at any of those. Instead, he’s focused on the ten posters centered in the midst--the ones that no one’s dared to touch with musical flyers, or any other kind, for that matter.

They’re the missing persons reports of each student who’s disappeared in the last four months. Each has a name that’s printed in large, legible block letters with red or black ink. Beneath that, there are numbers to contact either the local police station or a family member with information. Some have rewards on them or pictures of the student’s family.

The most interesting thing about them, though, is that not one of them is like the other; because they’ve been made by different people—friends of the student or his family—they’re all written in different formats, different backing colors, different shades of white. Ivory, ghost, anti-flash: you can imagine the colors get darker, as the likelihood of their return decreases. Months go by. Some are torn, at the corners, from gradual wear; the tape is peeling. As hope decays, so does the condition of these flyers. 

Peter has been watching him for a while. Finally, he decides to make his presence known. “A tragedy, isn’t it?”

Only after speaking up, however, does he remember what Mr. Deaton said about death: one is a tragedy, one million is a statistic. What about ten? Or is it different, if the person is only missing?

That damn counselor has gotten into his head.

The guy sidles the strap of his backpack on his shoulder and changes his footing. He’s probably been standing still for a while. It’s like watching something thaw.

“It’s good,” he says. His voice is low, gruffer than expected of someone so young. “It’s a memorial to the missing students.”

It’s strange to hear a new student refer to them that way, with ‘the.’ To him, they should just be some--ten people, missing, nondescript. Or perhaps he’s already heard of them from a passerby who saw him staring at the reports. Or maybe from someone at his former school. Word travels.

It’s also strange to hear the reports described as a memorial since memorials are usually dedicated to the dead—these students are only missing. Brass statues and burial tombs: those are memorials. These are only sheets of paper taped to the school office’s glass window.

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Peter says. He’s disquieted by the guy, but also interested. What makes him stare like this, at these reports? There’s a steeliness in his eyes, like indignation. As if he’s a veteran at Memorial Wall.

Suddenly, it hits Peter: “Are you related to one of them?”

“No,” he says. When he speaks, it sounds like a cough, as though he’s speaking through his teeth, “just a sympathizer.” He reaches forward, to one poster’s corner where the tape has begun to peel, and presses it down with his index finger. It doesn’t stick. This seems to upset him.

“I hope he sees these,” the guy says. “The kidnapper. I hope he walks by these every day and sees the pictures of the families he’s hurting.”

“Yes, but that’s assuming he’s even someone who works at this school,” Peter says.

That’s a conversation everyone at Beacon High had months ago, around the time of the third disappearance: whether or not the kidnapper was a member of the school. And then whether he was a student or faculty member.

It could have been anyone. Fingers were pointed at teachers with dubious background records, custodians with master keys, and outcast students who hadn’t really done anything—but you know what they say about the quiet ones.

No one really knew, though, or could even make a persuasive guess. The missing students seemed to be snatched up as if by a UFO--abducted without the explanatory crop circles. They weren’t the stereotypical cases. They weren’t walking home alone when the white van slowed to the curb or had gone home from a party with a drifter who no one had gotten a good look at. These had vanished during lunch periods, trips to the bathroom, even between class periods.

One second they were there. The next? Gone.

The guy turns toward Peter. He stares. It’s the same kind of stare Mr. Mardons gave him earlier, the one that looks like he’s found something. But what?

“I don’t think we’ve met,” he says. The bitterness with which he looked at the reports is suddenly gone now, like a channel changed on a television screen, drama to comedy, or to the halcyon tint of a commercial vignette. His face is warm and welcoming.

“I’m new to this school,” he says. Then he offers his hand for a shake. “My name is Chris.”


	2. Pink and Purple

The table is made of slate concrete and is black as obsidian. On it, pencil lead slides easier than a ballpoint pen, and the lines of whatever’s written are like crushed silver.

Peter scrawls his signature again and again. Side by side, and then in circles. He makes it into pattern like an Escher painting or synchronized swimmers. The loop of the P, an arm arcing out of the water, and then the jutting towers of his H: legs suspended, stiff as mannequins. He repeats this form until it’s perfect, like the autograph of a celebrity, and then he tries to recreate it. The tabletop is spangled with little Peter Hales.

What he’s doing is procrastinating. It’s third period chemistry and he’s supposed to be working on a lab experiment. The four or five other students he’s been issued as a lab group are clustered around a buret filled with a clear chemical that they dispense into a flask—also filled with something clear, possibly plain water— by twisting a knob. He only faintly remembers what the objective of this is: they twist the knob, a drop of chemical falls out, then they swirl the flask and hope whatever solution is in it will turn pink. Whichever lab group can manage the lightest shade of pink wins. It’s like a blushing contest.

Peter, however, keeps to the opposite side of the table and solitarily curls his P’s and plants his H’s like fence posts. He’s not interested in participating. Even if he were, he couldn’t accommodate their stupidity, or the way their hammy hands twist the knob too hard and too much chemical dispenses, or the way they ponder adjectives with each other to describe the color they’re seeing and then write it down in their lab notebooks.

“Like Big Red when you chew most of the flavor out,” he overhears someone say. He almost vomits.

He’ll filch their data later and correct the human errors with his common sense. If they’ve balanced their equations incorrectly or made missteps in their conclusion statements, he’ll polish those out before submitting his observations for a better grade than theirs. It’s corrupt, in a way, but that doesn’t bother him. Science is all about corruption. Ask Watson and Crick.

He hears someone nearby propose to his group that they should try swirling the flask the opposite direction--“Maybe you’re supposed to do it counterclockwise”--and then Peter gives up on reality. He returns to his signatures, perfecting the swoops of his P’s and the angles of his H’s. Now he understands how maniacs can cover whole walls with writing. These idiots are driving him insane.

He writes his name until there is a swarm of Peter Hales. Each one a single strand, a ribbon, curved and hooked in his finest cursive so that each letter forms and fills the black slate table. He does this until it becomes boring, and then smudges the signatures away with his fingers, leaving graphite on his hands like a coal miner. He wants to write something else.

There are a thousand words he could choose from: days of the week, SAT vocabulary, French verb conjugations, snatches of poetry, names of colors (preferably ones that would substitute for “chewed up Big Red”), or state capitals. But he doesn’t think of any of those. He doesn’t think at all, actually, and his hand seems to move of its own volition. It’s as if he’s ghostwriting.

He writes “Chris Argent” in scrolling cursive script, and beneath it he draws a line. Chris Argent on a pedestal.

It tempts his eraser. He wants to smudge it out, or even better, scratch it out. Turn it into a gritty stain, a charcoal footprint. But he doesn’t. He lets it linger like a specimen in a test tube and ponders the name.

Chris Argent, he thinks. What an asshole.

It’s been two weeks now since he first transferred to Beacon High, and since then he and Peter have been--you could probably call it "hanging out."

But that wasn’t what it was for the first few days. Back then, it had just been business. Peter showed him to his classes, toured him through the library and cafeteria and “places he would need to know the locations of,” according to Mr. Deaton. But it wasn’t until he ran out of places to show him and began resorting to supply closets and the girls’ locker room that he realized Chris already knew the paths to his classes.

What they were doing now wasn’t business. It was pleasure.

His attention is suddenly broken from the name on the table as the four students comprising his lab group begin to rustle. They think they’ve got something. One swirls the flask beneath the nozzle of the buret and the once clear liquid within it is now swimming pink, splashing around the edges.

“That’s it!” one of them says.

Then another, “See, it’s Big Red!” It’s the same boy from before. Peter remembers his voice.

A girl then joins him. She takes issue with his description and proposes that the color is flamingo, not Big Red. They begin to bicker over which word is more appropriate for what’s sloshing around in their flask, but just then the color changes. The two look over in time to catch it fade from pink to clear. The color has escaped them. Not enough chemical. They’ll have to try again.

Peter dismisses their brief joy and turns back to the name written on the table, which is shining up at him like an engraving. Chris Argent. It’s still there, unlike the pink in the bottle. The name is stable. It holds weight.

He taps the tip of his pencil on the hard, black table beside the T, and a few graphite pinpricks are left behind like little stars. On the fourth or fifth tap he holds the pencil down and draws the pinprick into a long swoop. A shooting star. It becomes the hook of a P and then connects to the rest of his name.

Peter Hale. It’s automatic. He draws a line under it, and then an ampersand between it and Chris’ name. Chris Argent & Peter Hale. It’s like something out of a little girl’s diary. All it needs is a puffy heart with an arrow stuck through it.

Yesterday they had gone together--they and thirty other students--to a local college for a lecture.  The fieldtrip was excused. Just another way to skip school without it counting against his attendance.

Chris went with him. Perhaps it was because he was interested in the topic or because he thought it was another place he needed touring. Or even for a third reason, altogether mysterious: a reason like dense fog. A smoke signal. A reason with ulterior motives.

Peter likes to think it was the last one.

The lecture itself wasn’t very interesting. Even now in retrospect, it isn’t. It was something about medicine, launching a war on AIDS, and the lecturer shouting and swinging his arms the entire time he explained. His microphone had cut out twenty minutes in, so he had to communicate through exaggerated swoops of his arms for the students sitting at the very back of the room to understand him. It was like playing charades.

At one point he positioned his hands so that they were perpendicular, one bisecting the other from underneath. Together they looked like a letter T.

“T cell,” Chris had said, leaning over to whisper in Peter’s ear. He was close enough to feel the warmth radiating off his skin. They were trying to guess what the lecturer was saying.

“No,” Peter said. He cupped his hand between his mouth and Chris’ ear, the fuzz of a premature beard bristling against his thumb. “He forgot what he was going to say, and now he’s calling a timeout.”

Their chaperon then shot them a look to quiet down. The venue was too prestigious for a standard shush. They were all guests here. Everyone had to maintain the same etiquette, so the warning was silent.

It wasn’t the only time the chaperon looked at them. There were many more of those looks. Afterward she had scolded them both outside the lecture hall for being so rude.

“Kindergarteners,” was the word she used. As she walked away from them, Peter made a comment under his breath about kindergarteners being weaker than newborn lambs. There was a difference.

He could kill her if he wanted to.

But that’s not what’s important. He only remembers this because it precedes the memory he’s looking for. Chronology: each memory is like a pacing mark on a treasure map. He follows them—the lecture, the scolding, the bus ride back to school, and then breaking from the crowd—until he finds them together in the library. X marks the spot.

The fieldtrip to the college was supposed to last all day, but the lecture ran shorter than expected: they returned to school with time to spare, and the chaperon dismissed them to class for the remaining fifteen minutes. But rather than going to class, Peter holed up in the library and kidnapped Chris to keep him company.

They were standing between a bookcase and a window. The venetian blinds on the window were downturned, segmenting their bodies into bars of light and shadow. Chris’ eyes were level with a bar of light, green and twinkling like ornaments lodged in a Christmas tree. He and Peter were the same height, but because of Peter’s slouch his eyes were hidden in a bar of shadow that wrapped around his head like a mask or a blindfold. His eyes should have been bright blue, but the darkness blotted them out like bruises.

“You’re not leaving,” Peter said, or something to that effect. Even though the memory is only a day old, details are already beginning to fade like the edges of an old photograph.

He reviews the scene: they were standing between a bookshelf and a window. He was leaning on the sill and the sun coming through was warm on his back, then he said, “You might as well consider yourself kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped,” Chris said. He looked around, as if checking for an invisible cage or a sniper with his sight trained on him. He didn’t find one. “If I’m kidnapped, don’t you think there should be something keeping me from leaving?”

“There is,” Peter said. He leaned on the sill and outstretched his legs so they blocked the aisle. “Yours truly.”

Chris looked him over. “You aren’t very intimidating,” he said before reaching forward and pinching Peter on the arm. That is a part he remembers clearly.

He pulled away from him, hissing. Then he understood the need for constraints in actual kidnapping situations. Ropes or duct tape. It would’ve been useful to have some then. Peter began to identify more and more with these kinds of people. Kidnappers and maniacs. It didn’t worry him. It was just an observation.

Chris overstepped his legs and proceeded down the aisle, until Peter caught back up to him. He slapped one of his hands against a bookshelf, forming a barricade and said, “Not so fast. Where do you think you’re going? You’re kidnapped, remember?”

As if he had read his mind earlier, Chris said, “If you really wanted me to stay put, you should have made sure I couldn’t move. Bound my legs. Tied me to something.”

Peter grinned, then asked, “Is that consent?”

The idea was tempting. His family had two or three racks installed in their basement, for securing themselves on nights of the full moon. He imagined Chris stretched over one.

Chris Argent strung up and blindfolded. Chris Argent laced like a shoe with glossy black belts. Chris Argent sticky with candle wax. Chris Argent’s skin turning pink as a strawberry.

Christ, he’s depraved.

“It’s advice,” Chris said. He surprised Peter. Just then he had been imagining him gagged with a horse bit. Hearing him speak wasn’t expected. “You’re a novice kidnapper.”

“More experienced than you would think,” he said. “Maybe, I should just cut your legs off. That would work just as well.”

“You’d have to cut off my arms, too,” Chris said. “I could still dead man’s crawl out of here.”

Peter didn’t doubt that he could have. Chris looked like an army brat. Or at least someone heavily involved in boy scouts. After crawling out of the library on his elbows, he could probably have produced fire from rubbing two pencils together. He even carried a Swiss Army knife. Peter had seen him use it to uncap bottles of soda at lunch.

He shook his head. “Now, let’s not turn this kidnapping into a murder. If I cut off all your limbs, you’d definitely die from blood loss.”

“That’s the idea,” Chris said.

Despite himself, he cracked a half-smile. Better dead than red, the saying goes. If you can’t kill them, kill yourself.

Peter rolled his eyes. “Ha-ha,” he said. “Very funny. But I’m afraid you’ll just have to suffer the next ten or so minutes with me. I can promise they won’t kill you.”

“You give yourself too much credit,” Chris said.

That the fifteen minutes had decreased to ten wasn’t lost on him. Already they had spent a third of their time bickering over whether or not they should even return to class. This, with the time it would take to reach the room itself, reduced that number to five. By then their classmates would have zipped up their multicolored notebooks in nylon backpacks and the teacher would have stepped down from her podium and retired to her desk to wish them all a good day. Going back now would have been fruitless. The decision had already been made.

“Fine,” Chris said. “We’ll have it your way. We’ll stay in the library.”

Although Chris would probably have liked to think that was his decision, they both knew Peter strong-armed him into it. More and more over the past two weeks, he’d begun to show less reluctance to Peter’s demands. More bias toward them. By then Peter could wear him down in only a few minutes. His resolve had started to corrode like an old car battery, a tooth rotten with sugar. He couldn't be resisted. He was irresistible.

Chris liked Peter, so it wasn’t very hard for him to strong-arm Chris into a kiss, either.

 

* * *

 

The table here isn’t as good as the one in the chemistry lab. It’s rickety, and probably old. Or if it’s a new table, it’s been so busted up by everyone sitting here that it looks that way. It’s gray and plasticized and there are grooves running down it from where people have sliced along it with tips of scissors.

And they’re just grooves, not words. No one even bothered to write their name or someone else’s name or both of those with an ampersand in between like how some people carve into trees.

That actually kills the trees, if you didn’t know. Love hurts.

So the tables are scarred and ash gray and long so that three people can sit at each one. There are a lot of group projects in this class, which Peter doesn’t like and doesn’t understand either since this is supposed to be a history class. Lab groups he can understand, but history groups? Isn’t that what political parties are? Maybe. But the people in this class don’t really have all that much to say. On TV, politicians rave like wild cats. Everyone in here is just docile as a kitten.

What they’re doing right now is nothing much. The teacher, who’s this little guy with dark hair and a sporty turtleneck, told them to talk to each other in their groups and come up with an amendment that they’d like to add to the current constitution, then he’d write all their ideas on the board and everyone could then vote for whichever one they liked best.

Halfway through he was interrupted by a stranger girl delivering a green slip of paper to his desk.

“Hanna Tan?” he said.

A tiny girl in the second row stood up. She was wearing a maroon letterman jacket that swallowed her up, which on the shoulder had a big patch of a silhouette person doing the crawl stroke through silhouette water. Swim team.

“They need you in room 2242,” the teacher said, then he dispatched her from the classroom with the green slip of paper and everything carried on like before.

Way at the back of the room and to the left, so that he’s up against the giant map spread out on the wall, is Peter. On his left he’s got Indonesia and on the right he’s got Chris. That’s just the way he likes it.

There’s supposed to be three people at each table, but there are only two at this one. That’s also the way Peter likes it. He likes to be alone with Chris. If anyone ever tries to sit on the other side of him, he’ll make a big fuss and sometimes he takes out scissors and scratches their tips on the table slowly, like he’s cutting skin or something so he can scare them away. He’s like a mama bear or a guard dog. A cat with its fur raised.

Sitting next to Chris way back here is advantageous for two reasons. One, because no one ever sees him copy off his tests. There’s always one or two of those goodie two-shoes in every class who just can’t let stuff like that slide. Even if it’s not their test being looked at, they still get put out that you’re taking shortcuts to get a good grade. It’s ridiculous. Sometimes Peter can imagine himself cutting into their foreheads instead of the table, a big red letter F with the tips of the scissors. Actually, that wouldn’t be so bad if they knew how to cheat, because then they could just draw another line on the F and turn it into a blocky A, which is what they’ve always wanted in life.

Anyway, Chris lets him cheat.

The other reason it’s advantageous to sit at the back of a classroom is because no one can see what you’re doing. You could write a poem without people asking you what it’s about and laughing, or make faces at the back of the person’s head in front of you. Or you could hold hands with the person sitting next to you without the teacher telling you to quit. PDA: that’s what they call it. It’s an acronym for “stop.”

What Peter wants to do is hold hands with Chris under the table. He can do that now because they’re dating. Or at least he think they’re dating. He wants to make sure, but he also doesn’t want to seem weak for asking.

He glances over at him.  Truth be told, Chris has been awfully cold to him ever since this morning, which is a feat considering they didn’t even see each other this morning. First period is basketball, which they have together. In fact they share many classes and that’s probably why he was paired as Chris’ tour guide. Who knows the paths to those classes better than someone who follows them every day?

This morning Chris wasn’t on the bench lacing his shoes when Peter walked into the locker room. He was absent, which was strange because he was never absent. He had a real vigor for school like he thought he’d win a damn medal for showing up enough days in a row. He was the opposite of Peter in that way.

Peter could imagine him getting called into Mr. Deaton’s office and being told to take a few days off. A vacation. “Go and see a movie,” he’d tell him, “take a swim, eat an ice cream cone.” God knows he needed all three.

And that little scenario could have been plausible, too, if he’d stayed gone all day like a normal person. But he didn’t. He came traipsing into fourth period like some kind of magic trick, a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and didn’t even have the decency to give Peter a “hello” when he sat down. In fact he didn’t say anything at all. He still hasn’t.

Peter looks over at him. More specifically, he looks at the dark purple bruise on his cheekbone. It definitely hadn’t been there yesterday. It’s so dark and purple it looks like he was trying to put on eye shadow in the car and botched the job so badly he applied it to his cheek instead. It really is a very awful bruise.

Peter considers making a joke about it, as a way to get Chris to explain it. But before he can, Chris turns toward him and looks him straight in the eye like he knows what he’s planning. Goddamn kid is like a weathervane.

“You’ve been quiet,” Peter says. He sounds much more gentle than he ever thought he could be. It’s like talking into a pillow.

Chris looks at him. With that same stoicism he reaches into his backpack down at his thigh and produces a book with a red cover. The guy is actually going to read rather than talk to Peter. What an asshole.

But instead of reading he lays the book flat on the scarred up table before sliding it across from him to Peter, still looking straight ahead like it’s some kind of spy movie and they can’t let on that a transaction is taking place.

“Check page ninety-two,” he says, looking straight ahead.

“What?” Peter says. “Is there an explanation there for why you’re being such a pile of shit to me today? Because I would love one.”

Chris doesn’t say anything and Peter guesses this means the secret spy transaction is over. Over and out, they would say, if speaking through walkie-talkies.

He opens the cover of the book; there’s no title. The back of the cover is yellowed cardboard-stuff and the front pages look old. Not incredibly old like a book that would have some antiquity to it, but like something that’s been around for a few years. The school library has tons of books just like this.

He turns the first few pages and still doesn’t find a title. He wants to know what the book is called before he reads whatever the hell is so important on page ninety-two, but so far everything he’s looked at is blank. First page, blank. Second page, blank. Third, blank. It’s starting to look more like a very fine and very empty diary rather than a book.

“Is this some kind of practical joke?” Peter says. He leans forward on his fist and flips through the fourth and fifth pages. Just like the others, they’re blank and yellowed like water stains on a ceiling.

He jabs the tip of his thumb into the back pages and flays open the book, then peels backward toward the front cover, looking for something, anything. A love note or an apology letter. A restraining order, even. Something to give him a gauge on Chris. But he doesn’t find any of that. He gets toward the middle pages and a fume of dust kicks up and Peter wonders if Chris dug this thing out of a vacuum cleaner bag.

He covers his mouth with the crook of his elbow and begins to wheeze. Since he had been leaning far over the book, like he was interested in all the nothing he was reading, the cloud shot straight up his nose and scratched his lungs. He leans back on his chair, kicking away from the table so he can double over and gag. His eyes are watering and he can’t get his damn throat to stay still. It keeps locking up like some kind of asthma attack.

He peers up over the table and, sure enough, a few people have turned away from their groups to stare at him. “Are you OK?” someone asks.

“Do I loo--“ he tries, but the sentence becomes a dry heave before he can finish saying, “Do I look OK?”

He lays one of his hands on the table to steady himself so he doesn’t fall out of the chair smack onto his face. When he does so, his fingertips get gritty, like touching the inside of a shoe you wore to the beach. He straightens up enough to see what the hell that is and finds that there’s a dark purple shadow of dust in a ring around the book.

Wolfsbane.

He curls his fingers away from the dust, into a fist, and his palm begins to burn. Everyone’s still looking at him, but no one knows what’s going on. They probably think he needs a drink of water, that he choked on a stick of gum or his own spit or something. They’re idiots.

Peter falls forward and catches himself on his hands and knees.

He’s an animal; he’s crawling toward the door of the classroom because he needs to get away. He can think about how the hell Chris got his hands on wolfsbane and why he subsequently poisoned him later. He needs to get out. He needs to go home.

He gets a few feet away from the table before people start standing up. Chair legs are squealing. A lot of them look repulsed like he’s one of the kids who’s escaped his padded-restraint wheelchair. They back away and finally the teacher turns away from his board long enough to see there’s a medical emergency going on in the aisle of his classroom.

“Mr. Hale,” he says, frightened. He fumbles around the sill of the chalkboard, trying to place his stick of chalk. “Mr. Hale. Mr. Hale.” He repeats the name because Peter keeps crawling. He probably thinks he can’t hear him. Really, he’s just too busy running away.

There’s another squeal behind him and then footsteps stamping the ground. “He needs to see a nurse,” Chris says. He leans over and grabs Peter around the middle to hoist him onto his feet.

“Get awa—,” Peter wheezes. He can’t manage vowel sounds. His lungs flatten whenever he tries. Chris gets him into a squatting position and then Peter’s claws dig into his forearm. He doesn’t even flinch and continues to drag him out of the classroom. Everyone probably thinks he’s a goddamn hero when really he’s in the thick of a murder. No one notices the blood staining the sleeve of Chris’ jacket.

Chris drags him by the shoulders down the hallway, walking backward. Peter twists and turns like a fish on a hook. Tries to get loose, but he just can’t. Tears are streaming down his cheeks from the wolfsbane. His face is probably contorted and blood red. He swings his arms, claws extended, trying to get at Chris or anything else, but he keeps missing. There’s cold linoleum sliding underneath the backs of his legs and that’s all he really knows about where they’re going. He thinks they turned left out of the classroom, which means they’re heading toward the cafeteria or the boiler room or one of the exits. There’s no way of knowing.

All he really does know is as soon as the linoleum becomes concrete and he hears something like a van door slide open, that’s it. The end.

This isn’t supposed to happen in schools. It isn’t even possible. Too many people around. Too many precautions. Too many classrooms with their doors standing open. There are metal detectors and security guards and routine locker inspections. It’s impossible for someone to snatch you up in the middle of all that—it breaks the rules. Especially here where it’s happened ten times before.

Peter’s going to be number eleven.

He bends his knees and tries to dig his heels into the floor to slow them down, but the backs of his sneakers only sputter with a dumb rubbery sound. Chris keeps walking and they turn another corner.

Peter chokes. He’s trying to call for help but he still can’t speak. The wolfsbane is like glass in his throat. He touches his face and he can’t tell if the wetness he feels on his fingers is tears or blood. It could be both.

He shouts again and suddenly there are footsteps—not Chris’ footsteps, but another pair coming toward them fast.

“Hey!” It’s a man’s voice, young. Peter can smell his aftershave. “What are you two doing?”

“We were outside and a bee stung him,” Chris says. He doesn’t stop walking. “He had an allergic reaction. I’m taking him to the nurse.”

“It looks like he’s going into anaphylactic shock,” the second voice says. He’s walking alongside them, probably wondering if Chris needs help carrying him. “Should I call an ambulance?”

“No,” Chris says. He drags him more quickly, and the second pair of footsteps quicken. “This has happened before. The nurse just needs to give him his EpiPen.”

Peter begins to jerk violently, whipping his head back and forth to say “no.” He can’t produce words so he has to rely on body language. He reaches up where Chris has him under the shoulders and beats him with his fists.

It’s enough for the guy to notice and he asks, “Is he OK?”

“No,” Chris says. “I told you, he’s having an allergic reaction. I need to take him to the nurse.” He sounds like a broken record, parroting the same explanation again and again. He doesn’t even sound panicked. At least not as panicked as he should be.

Peter wails loudly and he isn’t even trying to form words anymore. He’s screaming. He kicks and twists and then goes limp from trying. He holds out his arms to where he thinks the voice is coming from and then the footsteps stop.

“Wait,” the voice says. “Isn’t the nurse’s office the other way?”

There’s silence. Then shouting. The second voice, he’s calling to someone. More footsteps approach and Chris lets him go. The back of his head cracks against the floor and he goes unconscious from either that or the wolfsbane. The last thing he hears is feet stamping around, muffled, like bombs bursting underwater. Two sets of arms lift him under the shoulders and knees and he dissolves, chemical in a beaker. Too much. Too much.

The world darkens, pink to purple.


	3. Invisible Ink

The table is different now. The grooves stand out more and so does the temperature of the air. He was supposed to already notice stuff like this since he’s a werewolf with hypersensitivity and all that, but being blind for a weekend really makes him look at things in a different light. Especially since he didn’t have any light at all for so long.

Chris throwing that dust into his face really did a number on Peter. He had to go on a breathing machine for a while and then afterward his eyes were so scratched up by the sharpness of the wolfsbane crumbs that he had to wear a blindfold, like the kinds people sleep with. He’s healed up a bit, but one of his eyes is still pretty crumby. So until that one eye catches up to the other, he has to wear an eye patch on it like a pirate.

The people in his history class would think it was funny if they didn’t know why he had it.

They still don’t really know why he has it since none of them know werewolves exist and they probably think wolfsbane is a fake plant that movies made up to kill fake werewolves.

Instead, they think Chris was a kidnapper. The kidnapper. They think whatever it was that the pages of that red-cover book cast up was some kind of date rape drug. And whatever Chris was planning on doing with Peter afterward—oh boy. They’re just thankful it wasn’t one of them.

Peter hasn’t seen Chris in four days. Actually he hasn’t really seen much of anything in four days except for his dreams. He slept a lot during the recovery period and he dreamed a lot about Chris during that time. Sometimes the dreams were of tearing him to ribbons and sometimes they were dreams of holding his hand. The second kind of dream was the worst though, because they made him wake up trembling and he had to put the pillow on his face to scream so no one would hear him. Those kinds of dreams made him feel ashamed.

His dad had to talk to him about why fraternizing with hunters was wrong. He didn’t care one bit when Peter told him that he didn’t know Chris was a hunter.

“You should have been on your guard,” he said. “You could have been killed.” That last part was said a lot, emphasizing how serious ignorance could be so it wouldn’t happen again.

Peter isn’t ignorant anymore. Just ashamed.

Hunters weren’t supposed to be a real thing. They were a concept werewolves talked about in abstract like the way people talk about rapists or cancer. They knew stuff like that was looming everywhere and they had to be aware of it at all times, but it was never something they really expected to happen to them. It was just something made up so they knew to be careful. An invisible rule.

But just because something’s invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The table and the grooves on it and the air all around him are like that. He didn’t realize all these things had different tastes and colors and textures—nuances, that’s the word. Being blind really makes you tender to stuff like that.

The classroom door opens and everyone looks up. The girl entering isn’t a member of their class. She’s carrying a green slip of paper to the teacher’s desk and when the teacher reads it, he looks at Peter.

“They want you in room 2242.”

Peter gets up without saying anything. He spent a lot of time talking to the principal and other distinguished people with school board titles all this morning about the incident, and he guesses that this is just more of that. He doesn’t know what room 2242 is, but he knows it’s upstairs. Everything in the two thousands is upstairs.

Since he’s half-blind and too much exertion makes his lungs hurt from breathing, he gets to ride the elevator up to the second floor. The principal gave him a skeleton key on a black wire that opens all the elevators in the school. Anyone who doesn’t have one of those has to use the stairs. It’s just a loan, though. Once he’s all healed up he has to hand it back and start using the stairs again. But before then he’ll probably just make a copy of this one and keep using the elevators. They’re a lot easier for everyone, healthy or not.

So he rides up to the second floor and looks for room 2242, which is at the end of the hallway. He passes a digital animation class and an empty computer lab and wonders why he’s in a tech hallway if he’s supposed to be seeing the principal. But then he remembers that he doesn’t actually know who he’s seeing in the first place. He checks for a teacher’s name on the green slip that the girl gave his history teacher to give to him, but the signature on it is chicken-scratch. The only things he can really read on it are “room 2242” and “ASAP.”

He walks a little farther down the hallway and struggles to read the room numbers posted on plastic squares outside the classroom doors. The eye underneath the eye patch keeps pulling open; it’s really hard to keep just one of them closed all the time when he’s so used to doing the same things with them concurrently. Keeping both open or shut is easy, but holding one shut like an eternal wink makes the other want to sympathize and do the same. Sometimes the bad eye pulls open and causes Peter a great deal of pain from touching the cotton stuffed up under the eye patch, and sometimes he has to shut his good eye to keep that from happening. Then he’s fully blind again.

Room 2242 is way at the very end of the hallway and its red door stands open a crack so that people can get in; whenever the doors around here close they automatically lock, so they have to be left open unless someone wants to unlock them all the time.

He pushes it open. There are tables, not desks, in the center of the room and computers against the walls with laminated newspaper front pages tacked above them.

It’s the newspaper room.

The school has a newspaper it disseminates every few months—it’s  pretty bad because students write it—but Peter never really thought about where they did all the production of it. This must be it.

“Hello,” he says. “Peter Hale. I was called to this room for something—is anyone even here?” The room is completely empty, but there’s a little hallway toward one end; it gets dark and leads somewhere else. He can hear machines humming back there.

“Peter Hale?” a voice calls. It sounds busy, like the way mothers talk when they’re in the middle of something, but they really do care about what you’re saying. “Jeez, man. You’re early! Come around back to the library and in a minute we can get started on your interview.”

The voice is a girl’s and it’s coming from somewhere he can’t see. He moves toward the hallway and finds that it branches into another classroom. A computer lab. Most of the lights are shut off in it, which is normal for a computer lab, but it’s just as empty as the classroom he just came from. He’s starting to think he’s hearing things.

Between the classroom and the computer lab there’s a door; it’s to Peter’s left in the hallway. Like the one to the classroom, it’s open a crack to let him go inside. Behind it he hears the machines again, and this time they’re louder. He pushes open the door and sees that, in fact, there are four printing presses inside that are sliding newspaper spreads onto trays for next month’s issue of The Beacon. Bookshelves bulge from the walls, but they’re only filled with a few different kinds of books: one shelf of maroon spines, one shelf of yellow, one of black. Yearbooks. This must be where they keep the ones leftover from every year. What they’re keeping them all for, though, Peter doesn’t know.

“Is this what you meant by library?” he calls. The room smells of fresh printing and isn’t very big, just large enough for the bookshelves and the printers and some aisles between them. He walks forward and scans over the yearbook spines with his Cyclops eye. 1984, 1982, 1977. They go back with some big gaps between each year.

“Maybe if you came out I would know where the hell I’m supposed to be going,” he says, but a little quieter.

The printers are loud as car engines and the spreads they print out are very warm. Peter touches a fresh one and verifies this, but he accidentally smears the ink on the spread and then his fingertips are smudged with pinky-red. He swears and beats his hand on his thigh, but the color doesn’t come off. Not that he really wanted the color to come off. If it did, then it would be on his jeans. He actually just wanted it to disappear without staining his hands or his pants, like invisible ink.  

He walks a little farther so he’s in the center of all four of the printers, them humming around him like a chanting circle. It’s then he notices that the back left one is leaking a whole puddle of that red ink onto the floor.

What is it with this school? he thinks. Just last week people were talking about how everyone was going to have to switch to colored paper because they were running low on the standard white, and now they’re wasting whole buckets of ink with this defective printer? What a scam.

“Something’s wrong with one of your printers,” Peter calls. If he keeps talking and reminding the girl that he’s here, then maybe she’ll feel more pressured to attend to him.

He goes up to the printer and examines its dashboard of snubby buttons. He’s never been very good with technology or mechanics or anything like that, but maybe there’s something he can press to turn it off so it’ll stop leaking. But whenever he tries to focus on the buttons’ tiny, descriptive pictures to find the one with the circle intersected by a line—the “power” symbol—his vision blurs. Then the eye under the patch begins to pull open and he has to look away.

“It’s leaking all over the floor,” he calls. “You really should come in here and turn it off.”

No answer. He decides that there has to be a way to shut this thing off without the buttons, like a plug or something. He goes to search for one behind the printer, but the puddle has spread so wide that it’s impossible to go anywhere near the back without stepping in it. With one hand on the tray, Peter leans over to see if he can reach the plug from another angle so he doesn’t have to stain the soles of his shoes and leave a trail of red footprints on his way back to class. But when he looks behind the printer he doesn’t see a plug.

He sees a person.

She’s unconscious and bound with thick orange cords and slumped against the wall, and her skin is bloody as a newborn baby’s. It’s the blood Peter notices first—before anything else he sees the blood like its own three-dimensional entity lurking behind the school’s printer and waiting to jump out and scare him. When he finally steels himself against swooning over and fainting, he realizes that the girl beneath all that blood is Hanna Tan, his history classmate. And she’s missing a leg.

It’s been ripped viscously from the knee and all the inner meat slouches out of her skin like sausage squeezed from its packaging. He doesn’t know where all the blood coagulating on her shirt and hair and face came from or how it got there, but the puddle obviously emanates from this bloody stump lying dead on the floor.

Except it’s not so dead. Suddenly the whole thing flexes and he thinks she’s going to wake up, but instead a huge swell of tendons and blood vessels surges like a landslide onto the floor with a wet slap. Peter’s knees fold forward and then he’s spouting his breakfast onto the printer.

“Help!” he shouts. His voice is phlegmy from vomiting on the newspaper spreads. He stumbles away from the printer and knocks into the one directly behind it trying to escape. “Something—someone’s hurt in here!”

“Jesus Christ, hold on,” the girl’s voice calls. Then a big red ball struts into the room and shuts the door. “I said we could do your interview in a minute, OK?” She shakes her head and turns around to lock the door with a set of keys clipped to her belt.

“What are you doing? There’s someone behind that printer—“ he gestures to it and the pool of blood around it—“she’s mutilated. We need to call an ambulance or the police or something. Where’s the phone?”

“The phone?” She sets her hands on her pudgy hips and the chest of her extra-large Beacon High t-shirt rolls with laughter. “I’m the one who killed that bitch behind the printer. There’s not going to be any phone and there’s definitely not going to be any police.”

A trap. And better yet it’s the second trap he’s fallen for in two weeks. How he became ensnared in this murder and who this girl is, he doesn’t know -- ever since Chris crossed him his intuition’s been murky as soup. But he has a terrible suspicion that she’s a Hunter, someone their clan sent to finish up the job Chris couldn’t.

“Well,” Peter says. He retreats from her, but continues talking. In a situation like this, he figures that the best thing he can do is talk. It’s distracting and it might save his life for a few more minutes. “I assume there’s not going to be any interview either.”

She smiles at him to reveal a row of very white and very unhuman teeth zigzagging under her lips. Not a Hunter—a werewolf.

“Nice try,” she says. “First question: how long have you been in Beacon Hills?”

“How long have I been here?” He repeats the question like a beauty pageant contestant to stall for time. His single eye twitches from the printers to the bookshelves to the girl and then back to the printers. What can he use as a weapon? “Born and bred,” he says.

“Not you specifically, you idiot.” She shakes her head. “You and your gang. How long have you been in Beacon Hills biting people?”

“Biting people?” he says, and this time it’s not just to delay the answer. Words like “biting” and “gang” aren’t werewolf words—at least not genuinely. If this girl were a genuine wolf or even associated with genuine wolves, she’d say “pack” and “turning.” These little differences in jargon tell Peter that whoever this girl is, she’s got no idea what she’s doing. She’s an Omega.

“Biting people like who?” he asks. He decides not to answer straight away since the these questions seem very important to her. She hasn’t killed him yet, but whether he answers everything correctly or not is inconsequential. He’s stumbled onto the dead body, and she’ll kill him and stow him behind a printer just as well to keep him quiet. All he can do is defer her questions until he finds an escape route.

“People like me. And what’s-her-face behind the printer. I guess it was one of your buddies who bit her,” she says. “The one who bit me was a tall guy, blond. He saw me walking home and asked if I wanted a ride—what a fucking cliché, am I right?”

“Did you get in?”

“What do you think?” She flicks her hands at her sides like she’s shaking water from them, and ten claws slide out of her fingernails like switchblades, each of them a resounding “yes.”

“So, what? You think I’ll be able to tell you where this guy is and then you’ll be able to get your revenge?”

“I don’t want revenge,” she says.  “I want answers. I want to know why you chose me and these twelve other people.”

“What twelve other people?” Peter asks. He’s beginning to feel he’s taken the handkerchief from the clown—one after another, endless pastel slips of this story emerge from the girl’s mouth. What he’ll make of this information when it’s all coiled up at his feet, he doesn’t know.

She launches into a list of first names. “Bobby, Holly, Connor,” and so on. Throughout the first five Peter has no idea who these names belong to nor how they connect to each other. But as she closes on the list he realizes that they all make up one ghostly network. The missing students. And even ghostlier is that she’s ended the list with Hanna and himself.

“They—they were all bitten?” he asks.

“Bitten and biting,” she says. “And they were forming their own gang, too. If someone hadn’t stopped them this whole town would have been filled with werewolves.”

“It was you, then,” Peter says. “You’re the one who stopped them. You’re the kidnapper.”

“In the flesh,” she says, clearly enunciating the final word like a snake’s hiss. Then she puts one foot in front of the other and comes right at Peter, reinstating the question: “Now tell me. Where’s the rest of your gang?”

Peter toddles backward on his still-weak knees and smacks into the bookshelf behind him, each individual yearbook spine squeezing against his back like the bars of a cage. It rocks back and then forth, nudging him toward her like an enthusiastic spectator.

“I hate to break it to you, but I’m a lone wolf,” he says, trying to sound calm though his voice shakes. “I work alone.”

“Then you’re just as useless to me as she was!”

She hurtles forward and Peter ducks off to the left just as her body crashes into the bookshelf behind him. It rocks back and forth and spills a few yearbooks onto the floor, their covers falling open to reveal page after page of glossy monochrome people fitted into little squares.

“Stay still, you little asshole!” She shakes her curly head then charges forward again.

This time Peter hops one of the printers into a different aisle. “Why do you want to kill me?” he says. “How did you even know I was a werewolf?”

She spreads her thick hands on the printer and fakes one way then another. “I heard about what happened to you in class last week. That “date rape drug” the other guy gave you? I saw it on the floor and the table. It was the purple stuff, wasn’t it?”

“Wolfsbane,” he says.

“Whatever. Once I heard about that I knew I wouldn’t be finished after I killed her. I’d have to kill you next.”

“Actually you wouldn’t. If you would just calm down for a second we could talk about—“

“Enough talking!” she says, circling around the printer. She leans onto her toes, ready to sprint, and says, “This interview is officially over.”

With all the adrenaline trickling through his veins the world seems to move in slow-motion, and just for his benefit. The girl charges forward like a whale sliding through water and, equally as slow, Peter hops the printer to his left and she crashes into the shelf behind him. Her weight throws it backward and the yearbooks’ weight, in turn, throws it forward and topples it onto her. Red, yellow and black cover-books fall like rain from their slots between each other and then the entire metal frame comes crashing to bury her in a terrible, mosaic heap.

He trips around the damage to make sure she’s truly down for the count—nothing in the heap stirs. And with that, he touches a hand to his chest and tries catching his breath. All four printers quit ejecting their spreads and together sing a single, monotonous note as their dim little screens read the same word: _complete_.

 

* * *

 

It was a procession of cars. One by one they wheeled away from the school in opposite directions, like flies scattering from a carcass.

They carted the girl and Hanna Tan away on stretchers, sealed them into square ambulances and then shipped them off in the foggy midday light—one to the hospital, and the other to the morgue. Despite the odd flexing of her leg Peter had seen, upon arrival the EMTs said Hanna was very much dead, and had been for a while.

Peter hitched a ride in the back of a police car to the station for questioning. Despite being the victim of an attempted murder, they still found it important to scrutinize every detail of his story under a microscope. When three people are locked in a room and one dies while another is terribly injured, they don’t just let the third go free.

For an hour he watched the county sheriff plead with him to tell them what had happened in that room and how it resulted in nearly two deaths.

“Listen,” he said, sagging off the end of his desk. He had sat there to get closer to Peter—level with him, he had said. “We’re just trying to put all the pieces together, and anything you can tell us as to what happened will greatly help in sorting this whole thing out.”

Peter looked at him, his eyes depthless as two shallow pans of water.

He didn’t tell them a damn thing.

That moment he felt whatever had always caused his skin to tingle or blush or burn suddenly shut off and withdraw so deeply into his chest that his nerves were nothing but dry riverbeds. He couldn’t have told the young sheriff, who wanted so badly to level with him, anything even if he had wanted to. He was having a hard enough time leveling with himself.

Eventually a man wearing a gray trench coat and leather gloves entered the office. He produced a badge from his breast pocket and the sheriff and he talked in mute for some time. Then he gestured for Peter to stand and follow him out the door. They were leaving together, and next thing he knew he was buckled into his tiny gray car.

“I’m glad to see you’re alive,” he said.

Peter almost didn’t recognize him without his glasses and the motivational posters floating above his head. It was his high school counselor, Mr. Deaton.

“What are you doing here?” Peter asked. “Going to lynch me for missing class?”

“Very much the opposite. I’m here to apologize.”

The car purred into life and it rolled down the road.

“First you need to understand that what happened to you was a terrible accident. When I originally assigned you to accompany Chris, I had no idea he would try to attack you.”

“Well,” Peter said, “Considering he’s a Hunter and I’m a werewolf, what did you think would happen?”

“I thought you two would work together.”

“What?”

“We were aware of a rogue pack of werewolves in the area for some time and immediately linked them to the kidnappings,” Deaton said. “Chris was sent to investigate internally and find who exactly was abducting the students. I paired him with you because I assumed you two would better accomplish the task together than alone.”

“You could have told me that I was some kind of secret agent for Werewolf CPS,” Peter grumbled.

“That’s why I’m apologizing.”

The car swung a left turn and a small rain began to pelt the windshield.

“At the time I wasn’t aware of the circumstances,” Deaton said. “I was contacted and told that we would be receiving a new student to investigate the situation and that he needed someone who could assist him. It was a supernatural matter; I had no choice but to choose you, Peter.”

“So, a bunch of Hunters come waltzing into town and demand a werewolf tribute. What’s so suspicious about that?”

“My thoughts exactly,” Deaton said. “At first I agreed with the idea. It sounded logical that you two could cooperate and solve the issue together. But I was mistaken. It was a trick. They only asked for someone to help Chris so that they could expose more werewolves. They wanted to exterminate them from the town completely.”

“I’m not surprised,” Peter said.

“I was. I never would have imagined that they would attempt something so corrupt. Their code forbids it.”

Peter hummed. He had been told the Hunters had a code, but to him that didn’t make a difference one way or another. In their hands a charter of rules was no better than the Bible in the hands of the early Catholic church. “Love thy neighbor,” written in lucid golden script. And yet crusade after crusade stirred the holy sand into a slush of blood.

“Where are they now?” Peter asked.

“They’ve left. I would guess to wherever they were before they came here.”

“Let’s hope they go a little farther than that.”

Peter shut his single eye then. The car jounced over pockets in the road and rain drummed the windows with a steady white noise. He tried to picture Chris, wherever he was, seated on a bench and lacing up his shoes before charging off with a rifle or another wolfsbane-laced book to ruin someone else’s life. But he couldn’t. Something about the image didn’t seem right, and it melted away.

What he saw instead was Hanna Tan, slumped against the wall of the newspaper room with all that blood pouring out of her nubby leg. So much blood. So much. He felt tender currents of it swirl around him and could taste it in his mouth—metallic, harsh.

He tried to make this image disappear like the other one, but it held its shape. Any time he shut his eyes he saw Hanna Tan and the blood that drained from her nubby leg. Drawn onto the backs of his eyelids with invisible ink.


End file.
